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Friday, January 12, 2018

I was listening to a report on NPR a while back about how the expansion of the universe seems to be increasing in its rate, but scientists are baffled as to why. I also happened to be sitting at a light next to a Sherwin-Williams store, at which point a light bulb lit up over my head.

It was the light turning green, but whatever.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about this, and I came up with an idea: what if the ten dimensions postulated by superstring theory are actually an incomplete set, and there is another dimension causing this?

Hear me out on this.

Back in the early 20th century, around 1930, Edwin Hubble discovered that light from distant objects was red-shifted, a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect. In addition, he discovered that, the further away an object was, the further toward the red end of the spectrum the light was shifted. Finally, after taking uncountable measurements, this was determined to be true no matter your viewpoint in the universe.

This was illustrated by Stephen Hawking in "A Brief History of Time" as being analogous to dots on a balloon that was being inflated. No matter which dot you were focusing on, all the other dots would be moving away from it ... and the further away from your positiojn the dot was, the faster it would be receding.

In the past several years, using the Hubble and Chandrasekhar telescopes, we have been able to measure the rate of expansion at different points in time. We have discovered that the rate of acceleration was actually slowing from the Big Bang until roughly five billion years ago due to the gravitational attraction of the matter in the universe, at which point it reversed vectors and began an accelerating expansion.

Scientists have postulated that this is the result of "dark energy," an unknown force that has yet to be explained.

Let's say you have a ball -- a basketball, say -- and it is sitting on the ground. There is a very weak magnet (representing gravity) embedded in the ball at the top. You also have a metal ball bearing, which you put at the top of the ball, directly over this magnet (we are also discounting all external forces -- wind, etc. -- except gravity). Theoretically, this tiny ball will sit at that north pole indefinitely.

Now let's say we give it a teensy nudge, just enough to give it enough juice to make it past the event horizon of the force emanating from the magnet. We will see that the ball bearing will decelerate until it reaches this horizon, but will start accelerating once it is past it.

This is where my theory comes in.

If you look at the Sherwin-Williams logo, the red paint is the ten-dimensional universe in which we exist. The globe is a theoretical construct to illustrate the theory, and the the dark energy hypothesized by physicists is analogous to the gravitational force implied in the logo.

In this scenario, our universe is actually a fluid on a ten-dimensional sphere, with a force similar to gravity operating in an eleventh dimension to pull the fluid evenly across the surface of the sphere. This would also imply that this force is at the center of this globe, which would put it outside of our universe.

This also begs the question: is there anything outside of our universe? If so, what?

I am not a physicist. I don't have the mathematics necessary to prove or refute any of this. It's just food for thought.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

The interwebs are all a-flutter today over various breaking stories: Senator Dianne Feinstein releases the transcript of the Fusion GPS testimony.Darrell Issa (and about 70,000 other Republican lawmakers) announce their retirement at the end of this term. But if I had to judge based purely on the outrage expressed on Facebook, it would be that there is a full-time makeup artist for Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Now, as much as I hate to admit it (MAINLY because I know several conservatives who will take the opportunity to gloat shamelessly) I suspect this is a nontroversy created by the left in an attempt to generate even more public vitriol against the trump disast -- I mean, administration. And if you think about it, it really is a silly thing to get all torqued up about. However, I am not going to get into whether or not a make-up artist is appropriate, or if Obama had one, or anything like that.

What I want to focus on is the level of misogyny being exhibited here, by both males and females. Surprisingly, though, most of the snark comes from women. Here's a sample:

(male) "Make can’t fix ugly and haggard faces"(female) "Just think what the f they'd look like without the help..."
(female) "Not even a full time plastic surgeon can make the miracle😂😂😂😂waste of taxes!"

(female) "Total waste of money,still butt ugly"

(female) "I've seen better-looking corpses. Fugly duo "

(male) "Whomever it is needs a refresher course on facial plaster."

(male) "Not using enough bondo on that pointy ass face of kellyanne. She looks like an apple carving.

Pig snout sanders would do well to retire her face to sea world where it could only offend other manatees."

It is astonishing to me that, even after a viable Hillary Clinton candidacy, even after the #MeToo movement, we (as a culture) still judge women primarily by their looks.Now, in my opinion, neither of these women should be doing the jobs they are doing, simply by virtue of the fact that they are working for the worst person in the world. However, both of them are reasonably proficient at their jobs (even if, as in Conway's case, the job is utterly reprehensible). They should be judged on their merits (or lack thereof), not their appearance.Let's consider Ms. Sanders for the moment. The previous press secretary, Sean Spicer, got a lot of heat from both the press and the public for being combative, uninformed, out of touch, and blindly parroting whatever bullshit trump put into his mouth. Sanders is almost identical in every measure of the actual job, but very few people mention that she apparently has no problem dispensing untruths to the media much of the time, and instead focus on how unattractive she is.Look, I get it. Conway and Sanders aren't supermodels. Neither am I, for that matter, and neither is anyone else in politics. That being said, if they are going to be criticized for anything, let it be for how they do their jobs, not what they look like.I gotta lie down.

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Today I want to go completely non-partisan1
and talk about religion. Specifically, the concept of religion vs.
faith, and the similarities and differences between the two. I am not
going to be presenting evidence for or against the existence of any
particular god; that is a different topic altogether. What I want to
touch on is how faith gets distorted by religion. I will also be
focusing on Christianity simply because it is the religion with which I
have the greatest amount of direct experience. I am not comparing it
against any other religion.

I would like to set something
straight: I am an atheist. This does not mean I think that people of
faith are feeble-minded, or that I look upon them with any contempt or
pity. People of faith are the same as atheists in the sense that they
are simply trying to muddle through life as best they know how, and
faith is just one of the tools in their toolbox.

I myself went
through a crisis of faith of sorts about twenty years ago. I had had
things happen in my life that were chipping away at my atheism, causing
me to wonder if maybe I had been wrong about everything. I went to a
local Catholic church (I had been baptized Catholic2, and had attended services with my parents until around age 6) and sat down with then priest and explained my dilemma.

He
was honestly taken aback, as nobody had come to him with the problem
before. Yet his advice was to simply go into the chapel and wait.

"Wait for what?" I asked.

"Wait for God to speak to you."

"What if he doesn't?"

"Then that means you are not ready to hear him. It could take time. It could never happen. God doesn't speak to everyone."

I
was surprised. I half expected a sales pitch, but instead I was
essentially told it was up to me. There was no proselytizing, no big,
dramatic exposition about the fate that awaited me. There was nothing
more than a compassionate response. It was then that I began to realize
that faith and religion were two separate concepts.

As it
turned out, God never spoke to me. Not in the literal sense; I never
expected that. But the whole time I sat in that chapel -- a good hour,
at least -- I did not have any sense of religious conviction, or that
there was a higher power, or even a sense of calm and peace. Instead, I
was looking at the giant crucifix hanging behind the altar and thinking
things like "did they use lag bolts to hold that thing up?" and "I
wonder if the wooden beams in the ceiling are truly structural."

It
also got me to wondering about the various horrors throughout history
perpetrated in the name of religion, and how these could be associated
with this compassion. It was a disturbing disconnect, until I actually
started to parse it through.

Moving right along ...

One
of the common threads I have seen in various atheism-related Facebook
groups is an absolute conviction that everything that is wrong with the
world can be traced back to religion, and as a result people of faith
are routinely castigated for this. However, what is usually overlooked
in these -- for lack of a better term, "discussions," given the level of
vitriol often displayed -- is an understanding of the difference
between the two concepts.

"Faith," in this context, is very
personal. It is one's belief in some sort of higher power and greater
purpose. It could be God, or Allah, or Buddha, or the superior
musicianship exhibited by Rush on "Permanent Waves" and "Moving
Pictures.3" Faith is an internal dialogue between an individual and the universe, with the universe being personified by a higher being.

"Religion," on the other hand, is institutional.
It is the formalization of faith, with rituals, rules, proscriptions,
external reward and punishment, and so on. Religion can be very closely
tied to faith (as it is with the Amish, the Mennonites, etc.), or it can
have, at best, a nodding acquaintance with faith (a la Joel Osteen,
Creflo Dollar, and other charlatans).

The problem is that the general public uses these terms interchangeably, muddying the waters. There
are historical acts -- witch trials, the Spanish Inquisition, the
persecution of Galileo, and so on -- that were committed in the name of religion, not faith.
Religion, the institution, was the one making the rules, deciding who
was breaking them, and meting out (often cruel) punishment. In each case
there were people of faith who found these acts to be antithetical to
their faith but -- due to the power of the church to punish more or less
with impunity, for any reason at all -- almost all of them were forced
by circumstance to remain silent.

It is important to remember,
though, that when looking through history at the various atrocities
perpetrated by Christians against large populations -- from the Crusades
all the way up to Northern Ireland in the late 1990s -- had, at their
core, a religious component which manifested itself as the
dehumanization of an "other." In the case of Christianity, it didn't
matter if they were Muslims, or Jews, or even a different branch of
Christianity (the IRA, remember, was a Catholic organization fighting
against Protestants), all that mattered is that the opposite side were
portrayed as being evil in some fashion.

This in itself is not
unique to religious conflict, it is a common practice to dehumanize and
belittle the enemy (caricatures of the Japanese during World War II as
sneaky, goofy assassins who all wore glasses and had buck teeth, images
of Muslims as all being sword-waving, spittle-emitting, shrieking
maniacs, etc.). The difference here is that, with the weight of religion
behind these caricatures, they became normalized into society and
accepted as (pardon the pun) gospel truth.

The upshot of all
this is that religion made torture, imprisonment without real cause,
discrimination, dismissive self-righteousness, and many other terrible
things seem normal and sanctioned. In the United States during the early
20th century, there were signs posted at the outskirts of small towns
saying things like "This is a Christian community. Niggers, kikes, papists
keep moving." John F. Kennedy faced enormous backlash from conservatives
simply because he was a Catholic4.
Today any Presidential candidate that does not kowtow to evangelicals
is not going to get elected, regardless of his or her personal beliefs.

Now, let's look at faith,
defined here as "a belief in a higher power or order, over which humans
have no control, and which provides a moral framework for each
individual." People of faith exist in all religions, and in many cases
their personal beliefs clash with institutionally sanctioned beliefs on
at least a couple of areas. Pro-choice Catholics5,
for example, even though the official position of the church is that no
abortion is acceptable. Or Southern Baptists who do not personally
decry homosexuality as a sin.

In these cases, the individual is placing their personal belief system based
on religious teachings, rather than simply adopting religious dogma as
their own. Catholicism, Lutheranism, etc. are all templates on which
their moral structure is based, but they have each felt free to adapt
the ideology to their own lives, rather than the opposite.

It's
kinda like a California rolling stop. You know, you come up to a stop
sign and you don't come to a complete stop but you are going slow enough
so that you can stop virtually instantly if needed. You are following
the spirit of the law, rather than the letter.

As
an atheist (hell, as a human being with empathy), I cannot support the
atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion. It doesn't matter
whether it's the genocide in former Yugoslavia or a same-sex couple not
being able to get a wedding cake because a baker opposes same-sex
marriage.
There are a number of examples within the bible of what "faith" actually is:

Mark 12:31: "‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater ...”

Leviticus
19:33-34: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall
not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as
the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were
strangers in the land of Egypt."

James 2:8-9: "If you really
fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your
neighbor as yourself,' you are doing well. But if you show partiality,
you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors."

Matthew
25:40: "And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto
you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me."

I don't think I have to point out where modern Christian religious institutions fall down on these points, do I?

The
point of all this bloviating is to try to foster a deeper understanding
of the difference between faith and religion. Faith, in and of itself,
is not at all inimical to any aspect of modern society, as it is purely
internal. Religion, on the other hand, can be very dangerous (hence the
proscription against the intermingling of religion and government in the
First Amendment, for example), which is why we need to constantly be
asking ourselves, when faced with any religious act: is this an act of faith, or is it an act of religion?

1It's not very likely that I will be able to maintain this, though. Fair warning.2But I'm feeling much better now (rimshot).3Ya gotta give 'em that, even if you aren't a fan. I mean, "YYZ?" Come on.4Then, as now, progressives in the general population outnumbered conservatives. It's just kinda the way society goes.5Yes, Virginia, there are pro-choice Catholics, just as there are anti-choice atheists.